Education Reform

Robert Reich: The candidate could also call for busting up Wall Street’s biggest banks and thereafter limiting their size; imposing jail sentences on top executives who break the law; cracking down on insider trading; and, for good measure, enacting a small tax on all financial transactions in order to reduce speculation.

Elections and Campaigns

Nia-Malika Hendrson: The ‘Draft Condoleezza Rice for [fill in the blank office]’ movement will never ever die. And with an open Senate seat in California in 2016, the unquenchable desire among Republicans for candidate Rice has an actual office that she could run for in sight.

Animal Rights

Marcy Winograd: Thursday, in the late afternoon, I filed my anti-SLAPP motion to dismiss a meritless law suit challenging my right to express my OPINION that tethering ponies, butt to nose, to a metal carousel, forcing them to walk in circles on concrete for 3.5 hours is abusive.

Immigration Reform

Jennie Pasquarella: Last Friday, a California appeals court brought us one step closer to ensuring that the protection of our laws – including the constitutional right to a fair trial and an impartial jury – extends to everyone.

Labor

Larry Wines: Congressional absolutist dumbbells are quite literally playing with fire. Temper-tantrum babies. And they’re not much different from kids playing with matches in the hayloft, with barrels of lamp oil and a lot of nervous livestock in the barn.

Economic Justice

John Peeler: The only way our economy can produce equal opportunity for every person is through a systematic policy of redistributing wealth from the rich to the unrich. Our failure to do that in recent decades has put us on the road to plutocracy.

Progressive Issues

Larry Wines: We are disgusted because Congress is filled with payola-taking, temper-tantrum-throwing, self-absorbed babies who demand regular infusions of pablum from their fat-cat owners, pablum they then regurgitate down the bscks of the rest of us.

Law and Justice

Marcy Wheeler: As a supine Congress sitting inside a scaffolded dome applauded Benjamin Netanyahu calling to reject a peace deal with Iran, DOJ quietly announced it had reached a plea deal with former CIA Director David Petraeus for leaking Top Secret/Secure Compartmented Information materials to his mistress, Paula Broadwell.

Cheryl Dorsey: This multi-cultural group of retired and former police officers met with Rep. Jackson Lewis of Texas, a member of the House Judiciary Committee, to share and discuss their varied personal experiences with regard to institutionalized racism and the state-sponsored murders of all Americans

Peter Laarman: What the speeches most represented was the standard white perspective that we have problems due to the “legacy” of slavery rather than due to what anti-racism activist Frank Joyce more accurately describes as a “living, breathing organism of the present.”

Joe Mathews: The very thing that makes politics and governance in L.A. so confusing—all the different governments and elections in 88 cities, 150 or so school districts, and hundreds of special districts—makes this a great place for experimenting.

Rudy Acuna: A community allows us to build strategies for analysis, for action and for change. Examining political and economic factors from the concrete base of the community allows for development of more effective strategies for change.

Join the Occidental Chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) in collaboration with the ACLU Pasadena/Foothills chapter, Highland Park Neighborhood Council, La Raza Coalition, and the ASOC Renewable Energy and Sustainability Fund for our first forum of the semester on gentrification.

Carl Matthes: It’s so encouraging – and beyond my imagination of just a few years ago – to see lesbians and gay men proud to be lining up for marriage licenses in big cities, small towns, and rural communities.

Wellness

Carole Bartolotto: The problem with concluding that GMOs are safe is that the argument for their safety rests solely on animal studies. These studies are offered as evidence that the debate over GMOs is over. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Environmentalism

Walker Foley: Elected officials seem to think there’s only one side of this property rights argument. The people who live in these communities have rights too, but the oil companies seem to have the jump on [the politicians’] side of the fence.